Confessions of a Love Criminal - Stephen Smith

Love has a strange way of making fools of us. Sometimes we recognize the damage long before we’re ready to walk away.

In the town of Sapphire Ashes, Wilcox University stands among the aging houses and faded beauty of the Blue Neighborhood. Students hurry between classes, football games draw their usual crowds, and three women at the Moirai Coffee Shop spend their days serving coffee, trading remarks, and keeping a watchful eye on passersby.

Sophia Adkins is one of those people. Her boyfriend, Archie Ashworth, is a celebrated college quarterback with a temper that rarely shows itself in public. Behind the gifts and declarations of love, Sophia has been living with a very different man, and she’s beginning to wonder how much longer she can endure him.Then there’s Gardenia. Beautiful, outspoken, and still dressed in the glamour of another era, Gardenia was once known throughout Sapphire Ashes as the Pink Lotus. Her death nearly ten years earlier left behind a painting, a troubled history, and a presence that refuses to disappear. When Sophia begins seeing her around the university, an unlikely friendship develops between two women who understand what it means to give their hearts to someone who hurts them. Gardenia has her own unfinished story, and some memories have a way of returning no matter how deeply they’re buried.

Blending supernatural drama, romance, poetry, dark humor, and touches of Greek mythology, Confessions of a Love Criminal is a seven-scene stage play about wounded hearts, complicated love, and the difficult business of letting go. Beneath its ghostly encounters and theatrical language is a distinctly human question: how much of ourselves should we sacrifice for someone who claims to love us?